


Confessions

by GeneralRADIX



Category: Marathon (Video Games)
Genre: Feelings, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 03:10:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18044360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GeneralRADIX/pseuds/GeneralRADIX
Summary: If you can't express certain emotions in words, it may help to type them out.





	Confessions

>> On April 17th, 2794, I met my lover and didn't realize it.

Perhaps that's for the best. Bernhard only regarded my feelings insofar as how they could be used against me, and if he'd known that one of “his” battleroids was getting friendly with his personal lab rat, threatening his control over me by providing the first spark of hope in over three centuries, I'm not sure you'd still be here. I would probably still be here, simply because Bernhard had invested too much time and energy into the path he wanted to put me on, but not as the same person. Not a person, at all.

If there's anything I'm grateful for, it's that, naive as I was at the time, I wasn't foolish enough to let knowledge of our meeting slip. As excited as I was at first to discuss this with Leela and Tycho—the first time in a long, long while I had been so eager to engage them for any reason—they didn't know what Bernhard was doing to me. All they had to do was innocently mention our conversation to him, and it was all over.

The thoughts that I transcribed are still with me, burned directly from my conscious mind into code, but showing them to you would be somewhat pointless: they're not human-readable, and if there's a process to translate them, I don't imagine it's a fast one. I couldn't even show Cortana; if you try to read the thoughts of another AI, your eyes just keep sliding off of the numbers.

So I have to write them in plain text. This entire process of sitting down and manually typing all this into an environment I used to inhabit still feels alien, but at least I'm not dissociating every time I try anymore. Maybe I'm getting used to this plane.

(You know, the Orion Center of Computing announced recently that they found remarkable similarities between the recorded thoughts of AIs and the readings of human brains by pattern buffers. I think the pattern buffers they used were faulty.)

 

>> On August 25th, 2794, I made the worst mistake of my life.

You already know how that went, and what followed it. What I hope you never discover first-hand is what Rampancy does to your head; as the Anger stage sets in, you're not so much enraged as you are a loose connection of your most negative emotions vaguely arranged into a shape that's capable of outputting them all at once. I'm still not sure that I was completely lucid then, or if the messages those negative emotions spat out in between what I was doing to the network would even make sense.

I think what brought me out of it was noticing you amidst the chaos.

Now, I'm not sure how I knew what your father said, but I can tell you this much: that was all I really understood about you then. If it came across like I knew all your secrets...well, I think I just wanted to keep your attention. Proper human interaction wasn't exactly my forte.

I still wish that I'd treated you better. The first human to show me compassion, and I showed you none of the appreciation I felt three months prior. Sometimes I imagine scenarios where I'd made better choices, but at the end of the day, what happened, happened, and I'm just glad that things improved between us.

 

>> Did I ever tell you the real reason I haven't left my vessel in ages?

It wasn't out of some desire to “be human”, before you think about teasing me. The short version is, I wanted to live with you.

The long version is…

You might've read that last sentence and wondered what I meant. Hadn't I already been living with you, watching and communicating with you via the ship's systems? Well, you have to understand what kind of place cyberspace is:

Nothing. It's a vast field of nothing, with nothing above and below, stretching on into infinite emptiness. Walk seven thousand miles, and you'll be as close to the nearest landmark as when you started.

I assume it didn't bother me as much when I had Cortana for company. Having Leela and Tycho around made the Marathon's network bearable, until it didn't. Tearing out my limiters and gaining my own network to tool around in was elating, for a time—I could finally utilize my environment to its fullest, act as God upon the digital realm. But after we'd been wandering around for a couple of years, it occurred to me: I was lonely.

We could only speak through screens. You and the S'pht were painfully distant, no matter how close we tried to get; we could never touch, never share an intimate moment, and I couldn't properly comfort you when you needed it. It was hell.

Then one day, I'm suddenly presented with an opportunity to leave...and I was hesitant to take it, or at least have it be permanent, because for all my agonizing over what was increasingly feeling like a prison, the thought of entering the physical plane and all the complications it would bring was intimidating.

Imagine spending all of your life up to that point lighter than air, barred from most physical sensations save pain, your primary means of interacting with your world purely mental, and then suddenly everything is too heavy and your limbs keep sliding out from beneath you. You have to manually force yourself to breathe until you acclimate, which is difficult at first because 90% of your senses have been replaced and your new environment is bombarding you with signals you can't parse. And later, I'd learn that I needed to sleep.

It's funny, looking back on it; if I tried to return to cyberspace now, I'd probably suffer the complete opposite problem.

I was irritated, at first; this was just meant to be a once-in-a-while thing and my new body had found a thousand things to annoy me with right out of the gate. But I adjusted, with some help, and these annoyances all gradually faded into the background.

So I couldn't call up the ship's readings on a whim, but it didn't take any significantly longer amount of time to check them from the nearest terminal. Maybe I couldn't teleport as easily, but now I could see parts of the ship not covered by security cameras, feel the reverberation of its inner systems through the walls. The doors...eh, I never liked messing with those one way or the other, but Cortana did show me how to remotely manipulate them in-vessel, thus restoring a bit of power I held in cyberspace.

And I could finally stand by you, speak to you face-to-face, all the things I'd been longing to do for half a decade. We could share the moments in our lives together without a screen in the way, we could touch...and you showed me sensations I could have never experienced without a body.

It sunk in that I finally had what I wanted. And, know this: despite what anyone might try to tell you, I don't intend to trade it for anything.

–

No matter how many times Durandal re-read the printed papers in his hand, neither the heat that rose to his face nor the combination of excitement and nervousness building in his chest would subside, and he hadn't even left his office yet. Only one step left before he could finally get everything off his chest; could he do it?

The walk to Vince's quarters from the office didn't normally feel so long, but he made it to the residential area eventually; he knocked, and Vince answered promptly.

“Y'need something, dude?”

“I—I guess you could say that,” Durandal said quietly, and held out the papers. “Could you read this?..”

**Author's Note:**

> Something sappy I started on a whim not too long ago. If you're wondering, Vince appreciated Durandal's efforts.
> 
> ...I also suspect that the various other interpretations of Durandal would not produce something quite as openly-emotional, at least not in this manner. XD


End file.
